UK, Denmark and South Africa Provide a View of Possible US COVID Future

South Africa, Denmark and the UK were all ahead of the USA in their Omicron BA.1 waves and are now ahead of the US with Omicron BA.2.

Denmark and the UK have populations that are more vaccinated than Americans. South Africa has lower vaccination levels.

The UK demographics in terms of obesity and age is a closer match to the USA.

Omicron BA.1 sends the detected daily cases up higher. Omicron BA.2 is less detectable for certain COVID tests and is not treatable by certain monoclonal drugs.

South Africa is over 65% Omicron BA.2 and the US is at 3.9% Omicron BA.2.

South Africa, Denmark and UK are at higher levels of daily COVID death rates now then when they had the Omicron BA.1 wave of cases.

COVID Omicron daily cases in South Africa peaked Dec 15, 2021 and two weeks later the daily deaths were 53 per day and the daily cases through December were about 20-60. Daily cases dropped from 24,000 per day in mid-December to about 8000 at the end of December. By Jan 4, 2022 the daily deaths from COVID in South Africa increased to 150 per day. Cases continued to drop from 7000 to 3000 per day. Daily cases are staying steady at 2200-2700 per day but the daily COVID deaths have increased to nearly 300 per day.

Denmark is seeing its highest daily cases of COVID deaths in this Omicron BA.2 wave. Adjusting for its 2.2 million population then its daily cases of 40 deaths per day would translate to 6000 COVID deaths per day at a USA scale 330 million population.

UK saw increasing COVID deaths after Omicron BA.1 peaked but has seen a drop in COVID deaths in the last two weeks.

The US COVID deaths would be in the 1000 to 1500 per day level after declining from 2000 per day if the US matches the UK. The UK is about 2-3 weeks ahead of the US in the current pandemic situations.

SOURCES – John Hopkins

15 thoughts on “UK, Denmark and South Africa Provide a View of Possible US COVID Future”

  1. Those numbers are people proven to have had symptoms?
    (And usually one has to show 2 or more known symptoms to confirm a certain sickness, and confirmed by a doctor.)
    If not, they could have had anything, because the tests are not reliable, and worse, nobody knows what the tests really test for.

  2. If you read my comment properly, you will see I said that vaccines have turned it into something can be treated like the flu. It’s not flu, not even related, but with the benefit of vaccines it can now be handled like flu. I’m talking about flu in the broader sense of the family of flu disease. New pandemic flu strains can, without the benefit of updated vaccines, be extremely deadly too, as history tells us. Regular seasonal flu, less so. To that extent, now we have vaccines for covid, those vaccinated generally experience mild symptoms, similar to a cold or light flu. If a new novel variant develops, we may need to develop updated vaccines, as we would for pandemic flu strains. That’s the similarity I meant.

    By the way, not just my observation, but that of virologists who have worked on the development of the covid vaccines and treatments.

  3. Fixing numbers… Denmark has a population of 5.8 million people not 2.2. Also in the statistics provided by the Danish authorities people who died from other courses but happened to be infected with Covid at the time of death are included. Its fair to asume that Covid might have contributed to some of theese individuals dimise , but not all. Taking this into consideration the number of Covid deaths in Denmark are actually considerably lover than this text says (do a source check before publishing )

  4. Our only hope in this sense are vaccines and drugs that target all types of Corona virus, no variants can be able to escape. Let's see how well their development progresses and how much emphasis is given to them. There is a lot of market interest in not allowing these treatments to be developed

  5. It is not, and never was "like, the flu". Around 27x more deadly if we hadn't found ways to treat people mostly specific to this disease (though that too could be a low-ball, because that ignores the special measures we have used to reduce the spread…though it is hard to quantify how effective these were). 9x worse than the flu with the medical measures specific to this disease. With absolute, money no object, best care, maybe 3x more deadly than flu (early aggressive use of monoclonal antibodies in addition to other treatments), though, these options, and the knowledge that these are best, were not available early on. But, there are few that similarly would have gotten…immediate and the absolute best flu care…especially the elderly. Infant care tends to be more laser focused on survival, and recovery. At least in the US. Mostly because elderly are protected by medicare, while infants are protected by insurance plans. And insurers would catch a lot of flack, if they did not fund the effort to do everything to save sick infants.

  6. I don't know why you received negative votes, but it is easy to see why you did not get positive votes.
    Yes, you are right. There is no reason to think that it will become less deadly with every variation. The disease does not care about the outcome of the infected. It is all about transmission. In some ways that can steer toward lower intensity, in that, people need to be well enough to spreed it to others (not true in the past when people with severe infections were kept at home rather than sanitary hospitals). But that can be achieved in other ways like having a slow ramp up in the body, and change during the most contagious stage, before it crosses some threshold becoming very deadly. Transmission can be almost totally independent of severity. Lots of kinds of mutations can affect transmission without affecting severity or lethality.
    However, your dismal projections are not necessarily true either. We may come up with vaccines that are more broad acting, or we may come up with vaccines that are rapidly adjusted to any new variant. And I read recently that the third shot may end up protecting people a long time: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/health/covid-vaccine-antibodies-t-cells.html
    I think this thing could simply disappear. I think the main impediment to that is animal reservoirs of the disease. We may have to vaccinate animals as well. Though travel is still a risk. There appear to be many countries without high vaccination which also did not get much Covid.

  7. U.K. here. As of Thursday, the last of the covid restrictions will be removed when it will no longer be required to self isolate if testing positive. Cases are still high, but deaths have remained low, and hospital cases haven’t reached the peak they did before widespread vaccinations. Vaccines have turned Covid into something similar to flu, and with almost everyone now carrying antibodies through vaccination or prior infection, the government is unwinding the last covid restrictions.

  8. Dane here, 34 COVID deaths today, but these are all people who tested positive in the last 30 days before their demise, so not so useful. Don't know why they don't separate them out, should be fairly easy. Our number for hospitalized people, 1759 today, are also going up, but same issue. More informative might be to see how many are in intensive care, as well as those incubated, which where 34 and 12 by last count, far lower than earlier. Though that might be because of better treatment options?
    Since most people, especially those that go to hospital, will get omicron apparently, it might be better to look at the excess mortality? Though not sure where to get up to date numbers on that.

  9. Oh no, ~0.0006% are dying from covid every day, lockdown everything, the sky is falling. Oh wait, ~0.002% die normally every day, why panic.

  10. I have to fix some of your number’s.
    Denmarks population is about 5.8 million and the peak daylight death was 43(January 13.)
    Scaling to US population it gives about 2,500 deaths a day.
    But given different vacation levels you probably can’t do a linear scaling.
    Curiously the highest daily number of infections happened about 10 days after the peak of daily deaths with 57308 cases an January 24. With scaling that would be 3,2 million us case’s.

  11. Most likely that the BA.2 is associated with a more severe disease than the BA.1 . When I look at UK data I also see that the decrease in death rate is significantly lower than the decrease in daily cases. It is not a must that each variant is to be associated with a less severe disease than the previous one. BA.2 is definitely going to slow down a decrease in daily cases, creating a longer wake for this wave. We haven't heard the last from Covid 19. With such a high share of people already exposed to it, either through infection and or vaccination, the next variant is probably going to be very capable in reinfection.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/health/ba-2-covid-severity/index.html

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

  12. I took a look at them in Our World in Data. Seems like they got their omicron wave was about standard. Looks big in cases, small in deaths. I couldn't find the vaccine data broken out by region, but India as a whole has about 70% of the population with at least 1 dose, 56% fully vaccinated, almost no boosters.

  13. Add India to your list and tell me what's going on there. In particular the state of Uttar Pradesh which has a population of about 240 million.

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